3 Good Reasons Why Lazy People Can Be Successful

They don’t waste time on monotonous tasks

“You know what would solve all our problems? A new website.”

My boss put my name in for leading a web project group shortly after I joined the company. The person before me had left a mess. I had no experience leading a web developer team, yet he still demanded I lead a team of ten people.

I had zero interest. I wanted to get the project done as fast as possible. Move on. My job was in content marketing, not web project management.

So we started the first meeting. I asked for each person’s plan. I asked about their experience and ideas. Checked the budget, put in a time frame, including the internal people we have to consult. I wanted everyone to be on the same page.

But when I asked someone a question, I got a different answer. I asked ten people; there were fifteen different answers.

Like most legacy systems, the old data needed reshaping for the new website. Why was it taking so long? Blank looks.

Then I found something out. They wrote down each product before uploading it. Not only that, they outsourced it to someone who did it overnight — paying for 50 products per night, every night. We had 1,500 product lines.

What was the more straightforward way of doing this?

With two lines of code, automate and upload in 15 minutes. Let’s do it. We wrapped up the project in two weeks.

You may have seen the quote attributed on social media to Bill Gates:

It’s a great quote, but it’s not Bill Gates. The original quote comes from a study by Frank B. Gilbreth Sr, who studied bricklayers.

He noticed so-called lazy workers eliminated unnecessary movement and reduced fatigue. He also discovered that the “best” workers were the most wasteful of their motion and…

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